Renewable Energy-Aware Information-Centric Networking

TL;DR

This paper proposes a renewable energy-aware in-network caching and routing approach for information-centric networking, aiming to increase renewable energy use and reduce data center workload by leveraging geographically diverse renewable sources.

Contribution

It introduces a dual-layer solution combining gradient-based routing and caching to optimize renewable energy utilization in ICN networks.

Findings

Increased renewable energy consumption in network operations.

Reduced workload on traditional data centers.

Effective content placement near renewable-powered routers.

Abstract

The ICT industry today is placed as one of the major consumers of energy, where recent reports have also shown that the industry is a major contributor to global carbon emissions. While renewable energy-aware data centers have been proposed, these solutions have certain limitations. The primary limitation is due to the design of data centers which focus on large-size facilities located in selected locations. This paper addresses this problem, by utilizing in-network caching with each router having storage and being powered by renewable energy sources (wind and solar). Besides placing contents closer to end users, utilizing in-network caching could potentially increase probability of capturing renewable energy in diverse geographical locations. Our proposed solution is dual- layered: on the first layer a distributed gradient-based routing protocol is used to discover the paths along routers that are powered by the highest renewable energy, and on the second layer, a caching mechanism will pull the contents from the data centre and place them on routers of the paths that are discovered by our routing protocol. Through our experiments on a testbed utilizing real meteorological data, our proposed solution has demonstrated increased quantity of renewable energy consumption, while reducing the workload on the data centers.